Tangent
by Qw
Summary: She knows, now, why it never worked. Quistis reflects on Seifer introspective oneshot.


_With thanks to iamzuul for the beta. As always, feedback is much appreciated._   


  
They both always had to be in charge. In retrospect, Quistis reflects, that was always the problem.   
  
It was nowhere so evident as in the classroom. She'd worked hard for her position as an instructor, putting in hours at the library studying and seeming years in the cafeteria painstakingly tutoring Zell in history and politics (a lost cause, really.) She'd cloistered herself in her neat, clean double room with textbooks for a good part of every day since she'd come to Garden at ten. Meanwhile, he'd hung out with Fujin and Raijin, the trio not even bothering to keep their laughter quiet as Seifer made jokes about Quistis and her love affair with knowledge.   
  
She'd never have admitted jealousy then, that he didn't feel that nagging need to plan for the future. She wouldn't have tolerated the slightest hinting that maybe she envied that freedom. But now, as he has to sit down and listen to her lecture, she sees in his eyes the same emotions that her mirror showed her when, aged twelve, she went back to the double she shared with Xu and stared at herself for half an hour, wondering if the world was crazy or if she really was a freak for her ambition and focus.   
  
He wasn't in any of her classes until the second term she taught. She'd just turned sixteen and was still fresh enough that she couldn't help lording it over a bit her first day teaching him, calling "Almasy?" with the same cool tone she used for the kids who named themselves Trepies and followed her every move. Behind his sardonic comment she could tell he didn't like that one bit.   
  
But really, the trait hadn't only appeared at Garden. These days it only takes a little more effort to stir up memories of Matron's -- Edea's -- orphanage by the lighthouse. When you are five years old, a year is even more of a difference than when you're eighteen, and she and Seifer had been keenly aware of their own superiority to the other kids. She was always Matron's little helper, counting noses and quieting fights and inventing new games to play. He'd been a troublemaker from day one, instinctively finding loopholes in her careful rules and every day coming up with more and more outrageous dares for the other boys.   
  
And when she was thirteen he was her first kiss. When his warm lips pulled away he insisted he'd done it before, that she was terrible at it and that even Fujin could teach her a thing or two. She'd gone away crying and swearing to herself she'd never speak to him again. Xu had laughed when she told her, confidently declaring that no smart girl would ever have kissed arrogant (handsome) irritating (charismatic) Seifer Almasy. Quistis chose not to acknowledge how that might reflect on her own intelligence, instead returning a halfhearted chuckle. Then Xu had pulled her into a tight embrace and unexpectedly kissed her, something a little more than a best friend's comfort hiding in her breath. When Quistis didn't respond, she'd pulled back gamely and announced that she was a better kisser that Fujin, anyways - which broke the blonde out of her mood long enough to inquire how, exactly, Xu had acquired that basis of comparison.   
  
Her nineteenth birthday had gone quietly by in the field as they hunted down the Sorceress and her errant Knight. Inside, she couldn't quite believe he wasn't running the show. The Seifer she knew wouldn't ever play second fiddle to some arrogant, overblown soprano. She'd been oddly happy and all too willing to believe when possibilities of mind control came up, glad to hear he was possessed only by magic, and not owned.   
  
She's twenty now, an instructor again, maybe a little less strict, but she still makes her classes turn in papers in double-spaced black ink or lose five points right off the bat. He sits with his friends by the ocean with a fishing pole, waiting for the world, more than a little broken. There's a tracer he wears on his wrist at all times, the concession to several major governments that would prefer to see dead the man who nearly helped a madwoman to destroy the world. It transmits a quietly obtrusive signal to an office on Garden, so that should anyone anywhere call wanting to know the location of this threat, they can be told instantly. But when he throws his head back and laughs she's never heard anything so free.   
  
He's mellowed, she thinks. Maybe losing does that to you. And what has she lost? An illusion or two, a crush she's gotten enough distance on to not call love anymore, a bit of trust and a bit of innocence and more hi-potions than years of textbooks have given her words to count.   
  
Maybe it's enough.   
  
She can talk to him now, at the least, beyond propriety's few stilted phrases.   
  
_It'll do_, she thinks, peaceful. 


End file.
